Two projects for Online information tutorials

Animating the Research Project: Web 2.0 Tools for Online Tutorials in the Academic Library
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by Nathaniel Finley


Contents
[hide]

* 1 Introduction
* 2 Electracy
* 3 electracy:literacy as literacy:orality
* 4 Atmosphere
* 5 Atmosphere at the Community College versus Research Universities: A Literate Distinction
* 6 Finding the right tool for the right audience for the right situation
* 7 Mentors and Donors
* 8 The Atmosphere of a Donor
* 9 References
* 10 Resources
* 11 Multimedia Project

Introduction

IPs in the academic environment are presenting a great deal of literature focused on internet tutorials devoted to information literacy. A recent article by Sharon Yang (2009), for example, gives an excellent overview of the types of tools which are available and are being implemented in online tutorials, making strong arguments for developing online tutorial using more advanced and up-to-date technology. Most of the literature follows a similar format: the article reviews the history of online tutorials and then presents one example of a tutorial that is using an approach which the author argues can be successfully implemented at other institutions. Just to take one example, Kathryn H. Reynolds and M. Suzanne Franco argue that an online tutorial offered by Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio effectively employs a number of technological innovations to bolster the HTML-generated text-driven tutorials of the 90's and offer the students a more satisfying learning experience.

While these discussions are almost always fruitful and encourage the deployment of innovative approaches to the online tutorial schema, what is missing in the literature is a strong theoretical approach to the entire issue of online tutorials. There are a number of exceptions such as a very thorough and thought provoking piece by Therese Skagen Maria Carme Torras, Solveig M. L. Kavli, Susanne Mikki, Sissel Hafstad, and Irene Hunskår which describes the pedagogical theories that guided the development of the online tutorial "Search and Write" (Skagen et. al, 2008). The problem with this piece is perhaps indicative of the lack of theoretical discourse on the subject of information literacy in general: Skagen and her companions employ a traditional and "literate" pedagogical theory to a revolutionary and "hyper-literate" environment. This paper argues that such traditional approaches do not fully capture the essential characteristics of the new media technology which are being employed in online tutorials. In the hopes of beginning to bridge the gap between practical and theoretical discussions, as well as in the hopes of updating our philosophy, this article applies components of the theory of "electracy" as they have been developed by Gregory Ulmer to the online tutorial environment.


Electracy
electracy:literacy as literacy:orality

Gregory Ulmer [1] is a scholar noted for his work on film and new media theory over the last 20 years. Working primarily from the "grammatological" theories of Jacques Derrida [2], Dr. Ulmer first enumerated his theory of "electracy" in his 1989 book Teletheory. According to Ulmer, humanity is today experiencing a shift in communication and thinking which is spurred particularly by visual and electronic communication and is as revolutionary as the development of the alphabet.

“What literacy is to the analytical mind, electracy is to the affective body: a prosthesis that enhances and augments a natural or organic human potential. Alphabetic writing is an artificial memory that supports long complex chains of reasoning impossible to sustain within the organic mind. Digital imaging similarly supports extensive complexes of mood atmospheres beyond organic capacity. Electrate logic proposes to design these atmospheres into affective group intelligence. Literacy and electracy in collaboration produce a civilizational left-brain right-brain integration. If literacy focused on universally valid methodologies of knowledge (sciences), electracy focuses on the individual state of mind within which knowing takes place (arts) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electracy)[3]."


One of the best analyses of the emerging electrate logic is Ulmer’s 1997 essay "I Untied the Camera of Tastes (Who am I?) the Riddle of Chool (A reply and Alternative to A. Sahay)." In this article Ulmer reacts to critics of his notion of electracy and electrate logic in an attempt to "learn something..that I have not been able to grasp in my previous attempt to say what I am doing (p. 570)." In "I Untied the Camera of Tastes" Ulmer enunciates the following categories as important to electrate logic:

* mystory[4]

* heuretics[5]

* hyperrhetoric[6]

* Choragraphy [7]

* atmosphere (or alternatively "mood")[8]

* the tool CATTt[9]


Of these, the most important to electrate logic is atmosphere.


Atmosphere
atmosphere:electracy as concept:literacy as story:orality

-"The invention of Philosophy…is the story of the gradual apprehension and separation of the abstract notion of 'justice' out of the action of an Agamemnon or an Achilles. This process culminates in the invention of the concept—the complete abandonment of the epic story—that produced philosophy…(The) juxtaposition of the invention of the concept in association with the technology of alphabetic writing establishes what is emerging within our new recording technologies: the electrate equivalent of the concept. This equivalent is precisely 'mood' (Ulmer 1997, pp. 590-591)."

-"Mood or atmosphere is the fundamental unit of logic in electracy." (Ulmer 1997, p. 573).

When employing the notion of "atmosphere" (or "mood"), Ulmer springboards off of the workd of Jean-Francois Lyotard[10], who said "'Any act of thinking is thus accompanied by a feeling that signals to thought its 'state'(Lyotard 1994, p. 11, quoted in Ulmer 1997, p. 580)'".

Ulmer defines atmosphere in the following terms: "the disciplinary work of doing physics, making art, or any other career activity, is experienced within a specific emotional atmosphere or mood of an aesthetic nature (Ulmer 1997, p. 580)." Because the logic of atmosphere is a poetic or imagistic logic it is exactly a logic of atmosphere which governs the invention and use of electrate tools such as the internet.

-All thought, all research, all knowledge creation occurs within a framework (or "territory" in Lyotards terms) of affect (emotional response) to aesthetic stimuli.

-The stimuli (which are social), the framework (which is personal), and the relationship between the two are all defined broadly by the term atmosphere.

-Electrate media depends upon atmosphere for its functionality because they present "concepts" (the fundamental analytic of literacy) in a mixture of text, image and sound.
Atmosphere at the Community College versus Research Universities: A Literate Distinction
atmosphere:electrate technology as culture:physical environment

Using Ulmer's theory of atmosphere I want to look more closely at a possible way to use atmosphere to create online tutorials at academic university and community college libraries. My argument has three parts:

1. Every website has an atmosphere. It is intrinsic to the online environment. We cannot escape the logical parameters of atmosphere online anymore than we can escape the logical parameters of literacy in print material, although some formats blur the lines between these parameters (comic books are able to employ electrate logic, for example). Information literacy tutorials should be created with a mind toward atmosphere.

Ulmer's argument is pretty clear on this issue. Atmosphere, the basic logical modality of electracy, is intrinsic to the online environment. Whether a web site employs text-only or uses audio or visual features or incorporates Web 2.0 tools is immaterial. The website has an intrinsic 'atmosphere', and it is 'atmosphere' which distinguishes electrate communication from literate communication.

2. Every institution of higher learning also has an atmosphere which is communicated in its own specific and general "culture".

Electrate communication has "atmosphere" because it mimics the physical environment. "Atmosphere" is not the fundamental unit of logic of physical experience, but "atmosphere" is the fundamental point of intersection between the physical environment and the online environment.

A community college's atmosphere can be vastly distinct from that of a four-year or research institution. The atmosphere at a state university is itself far different from a private four year school. A research university has a different atmosphere from a small liberal arts college. And each school is going to have its own unique "mood" as well. The community college’s student body consists of many non-traditional students. Many of the traditional students are at a community college rather than a four year college due to either a lack of funds, geographical or personal restrictions, or academic exclusion. Most community colleges do not provide living space for the student populations. The faculty members at a community college are more interested in teaching than publishing, and as such devote more time exclusively to students. All of these variables help to create a "atmosphere" (or more precisely, a "culture") at the community college.

On November 24, 2009 I conducted an interview with Laurel Gregory, the head librarian at the University of Hawaii Center West Hawaii (UHWH). Ms. Gregory made the issue of culture and online atmosphere central to her concern for the information literacy of her students.

UHWH is small institution that offers AA degrees in liberal arts through in-class training and BA and MA programs through distance learning at other University of Hawaii institutes. Most of the students are enrolled 3/4 time. The students are for the most part below academic standards, which means that UHWH offers supplemental courses meant to strengthen the student's core skills such as writing and mathematics. For example, UHWH offers two English courses which are meant to prepare students for the freshman comp courses (English 100 courses). These are listed as "English 21 and 22". At least half of the first year students at UHWH start in pre-100 English classes (Laurel Gregory, personal communication, November 24, 2009).

Because of this situation Gregory finds that the information literacy tutorial which is provided by the University of Hawaii (LILO) to be unsuitable for the needs of her students. LILO is a largely text-based tutorial which the students have to read, and to paraphrase Laurel's argument, "My students are not going to read the text. They need a talking head telling them what and where to click and enter information (Laurel Gregory, personal communication, November 24, 2009)." In other words, the atmosphere of the provided tool does not match the culture of the UHWH center.

3. Online tutorials should be created in such a way that the tutorial matches or attempts to reflect the culture of the institution they represent.

The UHWH center demonstrates yet another way in which culture is distinct between institutions. Not only is the culture of the community college distinct from that of the university but there can be large distinctions between various community colleges. Gregory points out another problem when trying to think through an effective online information literacy tutorial. She argues that the familial and communal nature of the Hawaiian culture is so pronounced that an effective tutorial for her students must somehow incorporate elements of the "talking-story" and collaborative cultures of her students. In an atmosphere where everything is discussed and every problem is analyzed by the community Gregory asks "how do we build a bridge between that culture and the culture of individual analytical/critical thought" that is so central to the academy (Laurel Gregory, personal communication, November 24, 2009).


Finding the right tool for the right audience for the right situation

Implementing new media tools is more than a practice of technological savvy. It can be a refined art which targets the specific needs of individual institutions. New Media tools greatly impact the atmosphere of an online tutorial, and can create an atmosphere which allows the students to experience a personal and fulfilling learning process or can also contribute to impeding this experience.

New Media technology is being successfully implemented into a number of online academic library tutorials, while others still operate under a text-heavy presentation with a "sterile" atmosphere. The consequences of Ulmer's argument are that not only is the student non-responsive to text-heavy or sterile atmosphere tutorials, but they are non-receptive because these tutorials do not pique the emotional centers of learning which are the primary logical foundations of new media technology. It is not that students will not learn, it is that the tool provided is working against itself: the students cannot learn. The students who are exceptions to this rule are just that: exceptions.

There is a lot of discussion in the professional literature concerned with online tutorials about the role of IPs or professors as "mentors". In Ulmer's theory there is a distinct and important distinction between "mentors" and "donors". Understanding this distinction is one way in which online tutorial creators can re-orient themselves to the electrate mindset.


Mentors and Donors
mentor:socialization as donor:self-discovery


"The theory of the apparatus in grammatology indicates that electracy should be to invention what literacy has been to proof. The first step toward making good on this possibility is to introduce into schooling the aesthetic register of thought; learning, that is, may stimulate discovery (Ulmer, p. 581)."

The primary action of the electrate mode of being is invention/discovery (heuretics) which fosters an atmosphere of "co-creation". The online tutorial, therefore, is not a "mentor" of learning but rather a "facilitator" of learning. Ulmer calls such a facilitator a "donor".

"The donor is not a mentor in this model; the mentor, if there is one, is part of the domestic site, the home, the family, the ordinary world from which the hero has taken leave once the challenge to act has been accepted...(t)he donor...tests the hero, often by posing riddles...If the hero passes the test, the donor supplies a magic tool that the hero may use to overcome the obstacle, acquire the desired object, the elixir, and return home to claim the rewards (Ulmer 1997, p. 582)."

While this might seem to be an outlandish role for an academic librarian to consider fulfilling, it need not be. In this model, the action shifts from guiding the student along Socratic or Platonic principles to becoming a "trickster" of sorts. In online tutorial such a shift would entail treating the student as a co-creator, rather then taking the student by the hand and guiding him or her. It should be noted that this type of relationship is meant to bolster rather than to supersede the types of mentor-pupil relationships which are personal and still valid in the academic library (see, for example, Stamatopolos 2009). The distinction between "mentor" and "donor" is an electrate distinction whose proper environment is the online community or other electrate modes, not necessarily oral or literate modalities. Ulmer's point is that the internet is a domain of co-creators, where the overarching logic is the atmosphere of co-creation and heuretics.

Consider the following screen shots from online tutorials:


The University of Hawaii library system's LILO tutorial homepage. (December 2009) Login as a guest user


The screenshot on the left is from a linear "mentor" type tutorial, almost exclusively text based, which guides the user through the process of writing a research project. It includes lessons on information literacy and thesis development. But it does so with an attitude of a "mentor", taking the student by the hand and guiding them step by step. There is little room for co-creation in this environment, it is text heavy, utilizes only a minimum of Web 2.0 tools, and the navigation bar on the left of the page is "table of contents" style. The atmosphere remains literate whereas the technology and logic has moved beyond into the electrate, and it does so because this tutorial attempts to mimic in an electrate environment the role of "mentor".


The Penn State University library system's online information literacy tutorial homepage. (December 2009)









The tutorial represented on the right is ostensibly non-linear, by which it is meant that the student can decide where to begin and how to advance through the tutorial. Unfortunately the tutorial does not follow up with this style, and the atmosphere of the tutorial lapses with every selection into a text-heavy, linear style which also attempts to act as a "mentor".














Now consider a non-linear, Web 2.0 tutorial.


The Bowling Green State University library system's online information literacy tutorial homepage. (December 2009)



The screenshot above is from the homepage for the basic information literacy tutorial at Bowling Green State University. Notice that the navigation bar also has very clearly defined steps, but that the screen itself is full of choices for the students. There are Web 2.0 technologies employed such as RSS feeds, sharing selections, and video. Also, once the student begins the tutorial, each step is actually full of information presented in two or three columns with numerous links, videos, and analyses of tools which are available. While the steps are presented in linear fashion, what the student does in each step is his or her own choice, and the tutorial has the capacity to act as an "anchor" from which the student can self-navigate the web and learn about information literacy. This tool follows the pattern of Ulmer's "donor". The tutorial, in fact, is both the donor and the "magical gift", offering student a powerful tool to help them understand information literacy.

BGSU has developed one of the most exciting and multi-dimensional information tutorials online. The tutorial homepage [11] lists 8 separate tutorials, any of which a student or guest is free to navigate, with a link to "more" at the end of the list. Each tutorial, such as that designed for the GSW 1120 course [12] is a "gift" in the Ulmer sense, and most are self-navigating, non-linear, and exploit Web 2.0 tools to a high degree without overburdoning the page.


The Atmosphere of a Donor

The above analysis is not meant to say that every online tutorial must be as Web 2.0 savvy or operate with as much co-creation as does the BGSU tutorial. What I would like to argue, rather, is that an online tutorial should:

1. demonstrate an awareness of a post-literate logic. By this I mean not be exclusively text-base or linear, but implement Web 2.0 tools and allow for self-nagivation and co-creation to the extent that it is fitting for the institution.

2. reflect the culture of the institution. For example, at the UHWH center a successful online tutorial should try to reflect the students' needs for collaborative learning, "talking-story", and other community-based paradigms which are apparent in the culture of the institution. This type of tutorial would have a different atmosphere, utilize different methods, and provide different approaches to information literacy as would an institution where students are used to individual or independent work. Just as LILO currently turns the students at UHWH away because of too much text, so too might the BGSU tutorial swamp the student with too much choice and too much self-navigation.

Bearing these two goals in mind, I believe that creators of online tutorials will be greatly empowered in "donating" a powerful and useful tool to the students at their distinct institutions.


References

Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1994). Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant's Critique of Judgement[sections] 23-29. Stanford University Press: Stanford, California.

Reynolds, Kathryn H. and M. Suzanne Franco (Fall, 2008). "Education Tutorials: Online Research Tutorial Meets Students' Needs." Ohio Media Spectrum 60 no1 28-33.

Stamatoplos, Anthony (May, 2009). "The Role of Academic Libraries in Mentored Undergraduate Research: A Model of Engagement in the Academic Community." College & Research Libraries 70 no3 235-49.

Skagen, T., et. al. (Fall, 2008). "Pedagogical Considerations in Developing an Online Tutorial in Information Literacy." Communications in Information Literacy v. 2 no. 2 p. 84-98.

Ulmer, Gregory (Summer, 1997) "I Untied the Camera of Tastes (Who Am I?) the Riddle of Chool (A Reply and Alternative to A. Sahay)." New Literary History, Vol. 28, No. 3, Critical Exchanges pp. 569-594.

Yang, Sharon (2009) “Information literacy online tutorials: An introduction to rationale and technological tools in tutorial creation.” The Electronic Library v. 27 no. 4 p. 684-93.




Resources

Bowling Green State University Online Information Literacy Tutorial [13]

Multimedia Project

Retrieved from "http://lis5313.ci.fsu.edu/wiki/index.php/Animating_the_Research_Project:_Web_2.0_Tools_for_Online_Tutorials_in_the_Academic_Library"

Finley.5271.researchproposaltopic
Towards a Theory of Online Information Tutorials: Bridging the Electrate Divide
A research proposal by Nathaniel Finley
For LIS 5271 Spring, 2010

Introduction:
Information professionals in the academic environment are presenting a great deal of literature focused on internet tutorials devoted to information literacy. A recent article by Sharon Yang (2009), for example, gives an excellent overview of the types of tools which are available and are being implemented in online tutorials, making strong arguments for developing online tutorials using more advanced and up-to-date technology. Most of the literature follows a similar format: the article reviews the history of online tutorials and then presents one example of a tutorial that is using an approach which the author argues can be successfully implemented at other institutions. Just to take two examples, Kathryn H. Reynolds and M. Suzanne Franco argue that an online tutorial offered by Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio effectively employs a number of technological innovations to bolster the HTML-generated text-driven tutorials of the 90's. Reynolds and Franco also argue that such innovations offer students a more satisfying learning experience. Similarly, in a 2008 article Paul Betty presents a paper which “describes the use of screencasting software to create library tutorials and related issues including software options, production tips and techniques, and project management (Betty 2008, 295).”
While these discussions of pragmatic “tips and techniques” are certainly fruitful in encouraging the deployment of innovative approaches to the online tutorial schema, what is missing in the literature is a strong theoretical approach to the entire issue of online tutorials. There are a number of exceptions such as a very thorough and thought provoking piece by Therese Skagen, et. al which describes the pedagogical theories that guided the development of the online tutorial "Search and Write" (Skagen et. al, 2008); however, whereas Skagen’s team locates student’s learning processes across a wide range of fields of stimuli (i.e., the physical environment as well as the online, the individual learning environment as well as the classroom), the current project attempts to locate emotive and intellectual processes that might be tapped into solely via technological methods (i.e., the online tutorial itself).
The hypothesis of this project is that traditional approaches toward developing a theoretical foundation for online tutorial development do not fully capture the essential characteristics of the new media technology which are being employed in online tutorials, and as such are less capable of delivering the information which users need when turning to such tutorials. By applying to the online tutorial environment components of the theory of "electracy" this study purposes to measure how effective such a paradigm is as a criteria for assessing and discussing the development of digital tutorials.
Gregory Ulmer and Electracy
Gregory Ulmer is a scholar noted for his work on film and new media theory over the last 20 years. According to Ulmer, humanity is today experiencing a shift in communication and thinking which is spurred particularly by visual and electronic communication and is as revolutionary as the development of the alphabet.
What literacy is to the analytical mind, electracy is to the affective body: a prosthesis that enhances and augments a natural or organic human potential. Alphabetic writing is an artificial memory that supports long complex chains of reasoning impossible to sustain within the organic mind. Digital imaging similarly supports extensive complexes of mood atmospheres beyond organic capacity. Electrate logic proposes to design these atmospheres into affective group intelligence. (Ulmer, “Remediating the Apocalypse”).

In a piece entitled "I Untied the Camera of Tastes (Who am I?) the Riddle of Chool (A reply and Alternative to A. Sahay),” Ulmer identifies many of the important characteristics of electrate logic, including mystory, heuretics, hyperrhetoric, choragraphy, atmosphere (or alternatively, mood), and the tool CATTt. Of these, the most important as it applies to the present study is atmosphere.
According to the theory, atmosphere is to electracy what “the concept” is to literacy: it is that upon which an entire communications technology is centered:
The invention of Philosophy…is the story of the gradual apprehension and separation of the abstract notion of 'justice' out of the action of an Agamemnon or an Achilles. This process culminates in the invention of the concept—the complete abandonment of the epic story—that produced philosophy…(The) juxtaposition of the invention of the concept in association with the technology of alphabetic writing establishes what is emerging within our new recording technologies: the electrate equivalent of the concept. This equivalent is precisely 'mood' (Ulmer 1997, 590-591).

Just as “concept” is vital to literacy, so “atmosphere” is paramount to electracy. Without these components we would have neither literature nor electrate media: “Mood or atmosphere is the fundamental unit of logic in electracy (Ulmer 1997, 573).”
Ulmer describes atmosphere in the following terms: "the disciplinary work of doing physics, making art, or any other career activity, is experienced within a specific emotional atmosphere or mood of an aesthetic nature (Ulmer 1997, 580)." In electrate media, the artist is attempting not only to convey concepts, but more importantly, to convey the atmosphere in which those concepts exist inside of him or herself. Electrate media is essentially, therefore, aesthetic in nature, and the logic of electracy calls for the employment of multiple communication mediums at once, as well as an interconnectivity with other websites. One of the hypotheses of the current study, therefore, is that a successful online information tutorial will have moved beyond the simple layouts of early text-based world wide websites (which presented literary logic in an electronic format) and will embrace the use of audio, visual, network, and hyperlink possibilities which abound on the internet.
The Hypothesis
New Media technology is being successfully implemented into a number of online academic library tutorials which create true “electrate” atmospheres, while others still operate under a text-heavy presentation with what might be termed a “literate” atmosphere. The consequences of Ulmer's argument are that not only is the student non-responsive to text-heavy or “literate-atmosphere tutorials”, but they are non-receptive because these tutorials do not pique the emotional centers of learning which are the primary logical foundations of new media technology. It is not that students will not learn, it is that the tool provided is working against itself: the students cannot learn. This study attempts to test this hypothesis.
This study proposes to evaluate whether a learning differentiation exists between students using literate-atmosphere tutorials and those using electrate-atmosphere tutorials.
Methodology
Two separate web-sites will be developed, each presenting the same basic information except that one will present that information as a “literate-atmosphere” website and the other on an “electrate-atmosphere” site. A random selection of freshman students will be asked to participate in an online study and will be placed into two groups where they will be assigned to be a user of one of the two websites and administered a pre-test and a post-test. . The following parameters will be used as criteria for creating the websites:
1. This study will follow the similar format as was followed by Tornstad, et. al.,
when they developed testing for use in analyzing the TIP project at the
University of Wyoming. Specifically, Tornstad et. al. report the following
subject areas as important skills for a student to acquire through use of TIP:
“investigate a topic, search for information, locate information in
the library, evaluate the quality of information, and
use the information ethically and legally in papers, speeches, or projects.”
(Tornstad et. al. 2008, 55). Both websites will be developed with these
subject areas as their primary focus.
2. The E.A.T will be non-linear in organization. Rather than presenting the subject areas as chapters of the lesson links will be provided to each module without any preferred order. Similarly, the text will be non-linear, employing links to exterior pages and multimedia resources in order to convey the desired information of the subject area. For an example of something similar see: http://libguides.bgsu.edu/content.php?pid=54229&sid=397141
3. The L.A.T. will be developed in a linear and text-heavy manner. Each subject will build sequentially upon the last and the students will be instructed to work sequentially through the tutorial from the first to the last module. Diagrams might be used, but no multi-media sources and no external links. For an example of something similar see the LILO tutorial here: http://www.hawaii.edu/lilo/summer09/begin_tutorial.php
The pretest and the post test will follow the examples of the researchers at the University of Wisconsin (Tornstad…et. al., working from the ideas of L.A. Suskie), by employing both qualitative and quantitative segments. The pre-test will test students’ prior knowledge of information literacy and their attitudes toward information behavior. The post-test will analyze the student’s abilities to perform specific tasks after having used the tutorial, as well as asking for qualitative feedback from the students regarding the experience of using the websites.
While Ulmer’s theories have their share of critics, including detractors of a political nature, they are nonetheless theoretical foundations upon which information professionals can begin to build a discourse that penetrates beneath only the pragmatics of digital media in general and online information tutorials specifically. It is in testing the theory of electracy in a real-world situation that this study has the potential to offer a lasting contribution to the field.


















References
Betty, P. (2008). “Creation, Management, and Assessment of Library Screencasts: The
Regis Libraries Animated Tutorials Project.” Journal of Library Administration
48 (3/4), 295-315.
Reynolds, Kathryn H. and M. Suzanne Franco (Fall, 2008). "Education Tutorials: Online
Research Tutorial Meets Students' Needs." Ohio Media Spectrum 60 (1), 28-33.
Sahay, Amrohini (Summer, 1997). “…Is the Riddle of History.” New Literary History
28 (3), 595-599.
Skagen, T., et. al. (Fall, 2008). "Pedagogical Considerations in Developing an Online
Tutorial in Information Literacy." Communications in Information Literacy 2 (2),
84-98.
Slebodnik, M., et. al.(Fall 2009). “Creating Online Tutorials at Your Libraries: Software
Choices and Practical Implications.” Reference & User Services Quarterly 49 (1) 33-7, 51.
Stamatoplos, Anthony (May, 2009). "The Role of Academic Libraries in Mentored
Undergraduate Research: A Model of Engagement in the Academic Community." College & Research Libraries 70 (3), 235-49.
Tornstad, B., et. al. (2009). “Assessing the TIP online information literacy tutorial.”
Reference Services Review 37 (1), 54-64.
Ulmer, Gregory (Summer, 1997) "I Untied the Camera of Tastes (Who Am I?) the Riddle
of Chool (A Reply and Alternative to A. Sahay)." New Literary History, 28 (3), 569-594.
Ulmer, Gregory, “Remediating the Apocalypse.” Retrieved February 16, 2010, from
Marcus O'Donnell’s website: http://www.apocalypticmediations.com/hypertext/ulmerele.html.
Yang, Sharon (2009) “Information literacy online tutorials: An introduction to rationale
and technological tools in tutorial creation.” The Electronic Library, 27 (4), 684-93.

Boon Library in Hawi

I visited the Boon library in Hawi today, which is the oldest public library building in Hawaii. It was paid for by private funding. The Hilo public library was paid for by Carnegie funding. They have started building a new facility for the library...why, I don't know, this one is so gorgeous.

Concerning the third coming of Jesus

The story of Jesus is just that: a story. Being asked to believe in the story of Jesus is like being asked to believe in the story of Odysseus or Harry Potter or Star Wars--it's all very romantic and pleasant but in the end a story is not the type of reality that necessitates belief. The story is art. And art it is to be considered according to principles other then belief.

The story of Jesus is certainly high art. It is one of the most powerful pieces of art that we as a race have collectively experienced. Its power is to evoke an odd feeling of hope, something which is at once powerfully inspiring and awesomely challenging. The best works of divine art demonstrate these same qualities.

Where does art come from? I do not mean the creative force behind the art, but rather I mean the inspiration that triggers the imagination and stirs the artistic impulses. In the West we like to think that art originates in the soul of the creator, and that the origin is a completely individual well-spring. But what artist has ever created in a vacuum of cultural and communal isolation? Only the highest works of mystical reflection have been produced in such circumstances, and they all reference themselves to something beyond the individual, a source and inspiration that is supremely greater than the individual. That is, the very sources which come from the deepest isolation of individuality claim that their true origins are not the artist themselves, but rather a divine source existing beyond the sense of individuality.

Art is divine creation. "No matter how good or bad, art is a way of growing your soul." Kurt Vonnegut said something like that. This is because in the act of creation one taps into the source of all creation and struggles to attain a greater harmony with that source, a harmony of one's personal Dasein and the universal Dasein.

To say that the story of Jesus Christ is just a story is not to do the story an injustice--it is to treat it with the approach of truth, a truth which is said to have the power to "set you free". To treat the story not with an article of faith but with an article of reality is to do service to the story as a work of highest art, one whose well-spring is the universal divine that flows through us all and in all things. And more, it is to attain a higher understanding of the ways whereby art directs and guides human life in powerful and beautiful ways.

The first coming of Jesus Christ was in story--narrative art. This story produced a movement that took over the world powers of the West, reinventing such notions as love, justice, mercy, loyalty. The story obliterated the practice of animal sacrifice. The story unified disparate peoples and brought a common heritage to otherwise vastly diverse and divided societies. The story broke down the glass ceiling of transmigration of the soul. This was the work of the first coming, the first incarnation of Jesus Christ.

And the story was conscious of itself as a story, as a powerful story. It called itself the Son of Man and claimed “I and the father are one”. In the story of Jesus Christ we see an eternally self-referential source of divine power. The story as the son is the offspring of human and divine interaction. The story as the father births into humans a greater sense of being, evoking in us the inspiration to be more than we are—to become, indeed, ourselves sons of man. The story is also the father inseminating the listener with the seed of the son, which then becomes also the story revealed throughout history and in our own personal lives. In other words, this is not just any typical story we are dealing with—it is one of the most remarkable stories ever told but only if we approach it from the direction of truth-- that is, as a story. Such an approach loses none of the awesome potential of transformation inherit in the story but it does leave behind the shallow and hypocritical appeals to a false and theatrical emotion which attempts to believe despite itself in the reality of Jesus Christ. The reality is the story, because Jesus is the story. Outside of the story there is no Christ, but inside of the story is Christ and the entirety of creation. The story of Jesus Christ is just that—a story, but one in which the REAL is very discernable. The story is the first incarnation of Jesus Christ.

The prophecies spoke of a second coming, one in which the prophecies write: "this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven (Acts 1:11)." What is significant about this prophecy and others like it (even many of the prophecies Jesus made about himself) is that in almost all of them the sense of sight is the major vehicle of human realization of the second coming (see Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21). In some the ground will shake, in others the sea will roar, but in almost all of them there will be a "seeing" of the second coming.
Now, if the first coming of Jesus Christ was an artistic arrival, in the form of a narrative story (which is heard), then the second coming of Jesus is not going to be in any way different--it will also be artistic. And if that artistic incarnation is to favor the act of seeing in some way, then we should expect the second coming to be in the form of visual arts, rather than narrative arts.

The prophetic traditions also speak of the second coming as the time when Jesus would
secure his dominion over the powers of earth. Particularly Rome is used to represent these powers. Jesus would take over Rome in the second coming. So goes the tradition.

The second coming, I submit, has already occurred, in a very tangible and real manner: we call it the Italian Renaissance. In the Italian Renaissance we see Jesus coming from heaven in the same way that he went: first as a baby born, then as a man, then on the cross, then in the resurrection, and finally in the ascension. Jesus, as an artistic impulse with social transformative powers, took over Rome in the Italian Renaissance, and changed the way in which humans view themselves and their world. More than any other movement, the Renaissance ushered in the age of science with the use of the linear perspective style in which sight is progressive and moves in one direction toward a horizon. The progressive and observational techniques of science--which have taken over every power of the world--originated in the depictions of Jesus Christ in the Italian Renaissance, exactly as the prophecies predicted. The glorification of Jesus in Rome through art and architecture is the fulfillment of Jesus' empowerment over the dominions of the earth.

The second coming of Jesus already occurred as a revolutionary artistic movement which spawned the scientific revolution by teaching humanity how to see and how to observe--especially how to observe the heavens. The question is not when will be the second coming of Jesus, but rather when will the third coming manifest itself.

My first attempt at writing a spiritual history.

When souls transmigrate they have some power to choose which worlds they will inhabit. Souls who are very ambitious, or very brave, or very noble, might choose to try to break into the upper class worlds of ancient Rome, for example. This world was a politically confrontational one, and the Roman senate was more of a counsel of Godfathers than it was anything like a democratic republic. What the nobility did to one another was the sort of thing we see today in Mafia movies, and the lower classes did not have to treat with this kind of intrigue in their daily lives.

Instead, the ordinary inhabitants of the Roman world lived in domains of relative squalor, dirt, and disease. It is easy to understand why the nobility shunned the lower classes. There was a practical reason for this, even if nobody understood that reason. The lower classes were easily infested with illnesses of which nobody understood the nature. There were neither cures nor explanations, and humanity walked about in a great darkness. The nobility, by separating themselves from the lower classes, spared themselves from many of the threats which took so many of the lives of ordinary citizens.

Because the nature of disease was not understood the Romans believed that disease was a curse from the Gods. The nobility, sheltered and set apart from those disasters which struck the lower classes, naturally assumed therefore that they were protected and blessed by the Gods. Thus the ordinary citizens had their gods, and the upper classes their Gods, and the nobility treated the ordinary citizens with a great deal of contempt. The lower classes were, after all, cursed by the Gods—the nobility were morally justified in cursing them as well: it was their duty.

For a soul, therefore, to transmigrate from the world of the ordinary citizen to that of the nobility was a great feat indeed. It meant passing through the belief that one is inherently inferior and trying to prove that one is not. The separation must have been like a glass ceiling: even if one felt a certain amount of strength of character, the evidence was hard to put aside: the lower classes were morally and spiritually inferior. Even the very attempt by a soul to pass from the ordinary classes to the upper classes must be perceived as a noble effort. Surely the alure of riches must have been offset to some extent by a certain disgust at the underhanded way the nobility dealt with one another. According to today's standards, no morally pure soul would want to join the Roman nobility. I would imagine few souls ever even tried—and of those who did I feel that it is safe to assume that blessed few succeeded.

But Jesus changed this situation. Here was the story of a man who healed the sick. The message was powerful: the nobility were not the blessed of God. There was a Door way through the glass ceiling. And for the very pure souls, there was a way out of the disease ridden streets which didn't mean joining the ranks of the mafia-esque nobility.

Furthermore, the traditions of the Jews engrained themselves onto 1st Century Christianity and became part of the Christian way of life. The Jewish emphasis on physical cleanliness was a major distinction between ordinary Jews and ordinary Romans—the Jews lived in an environment of relative sanitation compared to their neighbors in the Mediterranean world. The Christian world, by making these traditions more normative, realized a greater level of sanitation and thus demonstrated the physical evidence that the nobles were not superior because of the blessings of the Gods. Of course, to accept Christian traditions meant to accept Christ, and thus the early Christians understood that the salvation from the noble-underclass caste system and all of the pain it entailed was Jesus Christ. It is easy for us to look back today and claim that it was the sanitary levels of Christians that made them healthier, but nobody knew that back then. Most importantly from a historical point of view, the souls of Christians breached a divide which only a few souls had really ever broached—and they did it with so much power that the Roman worldview—which by that time had become the Pagan worldview of the ancient western world—must collapse under the onslaught. Souls saw the rupture caused by Christian faith, and they understood that the Gods were not what it was claimed that they were.

a first attempt at an onto-ontological synthesis of the teachings of Jesus and the Bhagavad Gita

It has been argued that the teachings of Jesus are devoid of any reference to karma, and I for one agree to a degree. Karma is a philosophy of action, in which the actor is placed between the two poles of creation and destruction. Attempting to discover a balance between these two poles inside of the one’s self is the goal, so that the cyclical patterns of karmic interactions are nullified. The pole of creation is most often portrayed as being ruled by Brahma, and the pole of destruction by Shiva. Vishnu rules the space of maintenance.

What is conceived of is an energy loop between creation and destruction. This is the cycle of karma. In the sphere of maintenance, however, the loop becomes self-referential.

What we see in this triadic structure is a base of opposition between Shiva and Brahma. As in all oppositions there are elements of each one in the other. But in Vishnu, who is then the third point of the triangle, both of the other two are balanced. Thus Krishna, who is one of the manifestations of Vishnu in literature, describes himself as the creator and destroyer, the beginning and end (the same claim which Jesus makes). To enter into the realm of Vishnu is to have the forces of creation and destruction balanced within one’s self. This is the location of extra-karmic being.

What Jesus Christ teaches is also extra-karmic, or post-karmic. His teachings describe a different set of rules which must apply to the realm of Vishnu, because once the sense of karmic law is balanced within one’s self, there is no sense of higher authority to appeal to. This is why the Christian Church has degraded the teachings of Jesus. By creating a new law out of the teachings and myth of Jesus they have returned what is post-karmic back to the realm of karma. What Jesus argues is that in the post-karmic life, which has no authority toward which to appeal, the individual must rely upon a personal sense of truth and that personal sense of truth is made manifest through acts of faith in that truth—acts which are inspired by and justified by that truth. When Jesus said, “blessed is the man who does not fall away because of me” (Matt 11:6), he is giving the same advice as Krishna gave to Arjuna at the end of the Bhagavad Gita: "Thus I have explained to you knowledge still more confidential. Deliberate on this fully, and then do what you wish to do (BG 18.63)."

The onto-ontological interpretation of the teachings of Jesus indicates the extremely relativistic nature of the message of Christ. It also indicates how that these scriptures-far from being distinct from or superior to the teachings of other wisdom traditions-are actually in agreement with and shed a new light upon the sphere of Vishnu and the karmic relations between Brahma and Shiva.

an existentio-perennial interpretation of the resurrection

Even science agrees that the earth is doomed for destruction. The sun is going to explode a shock wave sometime in the next 5 billion years which will incinerate the earth--according to science our solar system is about half-way through its life cycle.

The perennial philosophy is a philosophy that takes as its dogma the idea that all religions inevitably lead to the same God. If this is so, I maintain that we should be able to derive a coherent understanding of the connections between religions that reveals the purpose and destiny of our lives. If we maintain that science is a religion then it is incumbent upon us to include science in such an understanding.

One of the challenges the perennial philosophy is currently facing is how to reconcile the Islamo-Christian teachings of the resurrection with the Asian philosophies of reincarnation. Using science, this thesis attempts such a reconciliation.

There have been any number of attempts to present the Christian teachings of the resurrection as teachings of reincarnation. It is well established among the traditional Christian community, however, that the teachings of the resurrection are not reincarnation teachings--they are teachings of the resurrection of the dead for final judgment.

I propose that both sides are correct. There is a way to understand many of the teachings of Jesus as reincarnation teachings. In another paper, I present the idea that the majority of the teachings of Jesus as pertains to "resurrection" can be understood in terms of a very general act of resurrection--terms which include in their logic both reincarnation (in the Asian sense) and resurrection (in the Islamo-Christian sense), as well as any sort of a transformation experience (baptism). It was primarily through the work of the Apostle Paul that the notion of the resurrection of the dead for final judgment became the dominant Christian discourse.

What is more important is to formalize a paradigm whereby we can conceive of the possibility that both the reincarnation scenario and the resurrection scenario can hold validity.

The Islamo-Christian tradition maintains that souls live one life and that at some point after that life is ended there is judgment. There are two problems with this approach. First of all, there is no logical reason to accept this conclusion unless we take the Bible or the Quran as the sole infallible sources of divine revelation and the final authorities for living the life of humans. The perennial philosophy necessarily takes this assumption to be false, and accepts no one source as infallible. Rather the perennialist maintains that all literature of the world's wisdom traditions hold some light inside of them which is shed on the divine, but not the sole light. The problem with accepting the Bible or the Quran as the final authority for life on earth is that it is impossible to come to one conclusion concerning how to interpret such complicated texts, and devotees of these traditions find themselves forced through emotional, cultural, and political developments to attempt the other's destruction. Accepting that war and the warrior are part of the human condition does not justify accepting an interpretive stance which cultivates aggression.

The second problem with the Islamo-Christian teaching of one life for one soul is that it leaves no opportunity either for the growth of the soul or the principles of the preservation of energy which rule physical matter. The Asian traditions understand the soul as an animating spark which transmigrates between various physical forms until it can escape the cycle of birth and death. This notion accepts an understanding of the principle of life, growth, and death (in short, the principle of transformation)--which is the most dominant principle on earth (and the universe). There is no reason to dismiss the notion of reincarnation unless we focus exclusively on the Islamo-Christian texts in which we arrive at the difficulty of how to conceive of the soul at all.

The problem is that the Islamic and Christian texts are very clear about a belief in the resurrection of the body toward final judgment. I accept this notion as valid since the energy mass of the physical body represents an imprint on the universe from the soul that does not just disappear with the erosion of the body. The body is remembered in the genetic and memetic codes of offspring, if nowhere else. Such a memory must necessarily form a connection between the soul and the body which persists after death. The soul is responsible for the body, and thus has a responsibility for the bodies in which it has transmigrated and the imprints which these bodies have made on physical and linguistic reality. If the soul attains Nirvana that is very well- the responsibility is cast aside and these connections are dissolved. But the majority of souls do not attain Nirvana.

Here is where the scientific understanding of the end of the earth proves to be most helpful. The Islamo-Christian traditions are concerned with the end of times, at which it is said the resurrection to judgment will occur. If we accept that such an end of time will come for earth at some point in the evolution of the sun from a main sequence star to a white dwarf sometime in the next 5 billion years then it is possible to make the Islamo-Christian texts commiserate with Asian religious philosophy. Because only those souls which attain Nirvana or some other form of escape from the reincarnation cycle are exempt from the rules of resurrection which govern life on earth and are described in religious texts of all flavors, the souls which do not attain such spiritual zeniths must necessarily be reincarnated in one form or another. Furthermore, due to the laws of the preservation of energy these souls will also at some time or another need to be faced with the realities of their connections to the physical bodies they have inhabited. The Earth is capable of storing the most significant imprints of such histories primarily through the transformation of mass from one energy form to another and the linguistic imprints which all life makes upon it's surroundings and fellow beings and leave as a heritage to its descendents. If the earth were to be incinerated, or damaged to the point that it could no longer sustain living mass or earthly language, it would be necessary for this mass to return to the jurisdiction of the individual soul and to inhabit some other physical space.

That the Islamo-Christian traditions always preface the final judgment with a fiery destruction of the Earth, it is not hard to accept that it is such a time as science prophecies which most readily describes such a future moment. But it is not just the one physical body which returns to the soul at this time, but rather some admixture of all of the physical bodies which that soul has inhabited. Thus Jesus says "At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven (Matt. 22:30)." I don't know what the angels in heaven are like, but if we think of heaven as space the angels could very well be stars, the people at the final judgment holding all of their bodies in themselves sounds like the type of huge mass formations that are the physical makeup of stars.

There are a number of positive consequences in approaching a commiseration of reincarnation and resurrection teachings. Foremost is a broadening of our understanding of life on earth and it's relationship to the universe. The notion is that the souls which are destined to go through final judgment at the end of time on Earth are not going to be either lost or rewarded in some ethereal and eternal heaven or hell. It makes more sense that the souls will be moved to other life-platforms, to continue their quest for enlightenment and reunification with the source. The idea of hell is therefore most sufficiently explained with the notion that those souls which have not maintained their responsibilities on earth in a coherent manner will be scattered and forced to live their lives once again--ie, "lost". But not eternally--only as a transmigrated life form moved to other platforms of existence. Heaven, or the "saved", is some new type of existence for the souls of those who are able to maintain their form in the resurrected space--perhaps these are now stars.

In order to conceptualize what I am saying it is important to move beyond the ethereal and ill-formed conceptions of heaven which stifle Christian doctrines. "The Kingdom of Heaven" is the universe--the huge collection of galaxies and stars and planets and life-platforms that exists outside of the atmosphere of Earth. Thus when Jesus says "The Kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21)," he means that feeling of the universe which we all have as part of the makeup of life in a system. The system is the universe, with it's gravities and lights and magnetisms. These stars and planets and galaxies are to be understood as living things--hugely powerful and of a different nature from ourselves, but restrained under the same principles of the resurrection (ie, both resurrection to judgment and reincarnation) as is life on earth. For these are the principles of life, and no life exists without these principles governing them.

LIS 5703 Subjects Paper

Nathaniel Finley
LIS 5703 Subjects paper
For Doctor Michelle Kazmer
December 10, 2009


Part I
A.
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot is a do-it-yourself manual for Volkswagen repair. It describes basic repair and complete overhaul of systems as well as periodic maintenance procedures for various VW models.
This edition is a special 25th Anniversary edition. There is an introduction by the author’s wife which describes the author’s life philosophy, and a photo collection of the author and his family.
The book is also about the author’s philosophy of life, which is an approach to living and problem solving that is representative of the 1960’s counter-culture.

B.
The likely audience for this book is VW owners who want to maintain and repair their vehicles themselves. It is more useful for amateur rather than professional mechanics, since the book presents tips and procedures for working on tight budgets without specialty tools.
Two unlikely audiences for this book are scholars of the 1960’s counter culture and people who are interested in “dropping out” of established society. This is due to the author’s use of the manual as a means for describing an alternative lifestyle and approach to living which is outside of the world of capitalism and careers.

C.
Derived:
John Muir
John Muir Volkswagen or (Volkswagen)
John Muir (not naturalist)
Tosh Gregg (“other author”)
Peter Aschwanden (illustrator)
Volkswagen Maintenance
Volkswagen Repair
Do-it-yourself
Repair manuals
Volkswagen art
John Muir Publications
Volkswagen—Santa Fe, New Mexico
Books—Anniversary Editions

Supplied:
1960s counterculture—history
1960s counterculture—philosophy

Part II
A.
Volkswagen repair/Volkswagen Maintenance
Do-it-yourself Volkswagen
“How do I _____ my Volkswagen?”
Volkswagen home repair manuals
Volkswagen maintenance manuals
John Muir family
John Muir Publications
Volkswagen—Santa Fe, New Mexico
Volkswagen art
Collectible items
Special editions
Volkswagen counter culture manuals


B.
I.
I decided to use Google for the search engine because of the popularity of this item and the various ways that it can be used. I found the following:
a. A search for “John Muir” returns results for the naturalist or derivatives of that name (eg, “John Muir Elementary School”) exclusively throughout the first 10 pages of results, with the one exception of a “muirjohn” on twitter who is listed on the 10th page as a communications advisor for the city of Edmonton.

b. A search for “John Muir Volkswagen” returns results on the first five pages exclusively for the author of my item with one exception. On page three there is the first result which looks to have no connection to the author of my item. This one item also happened to download a virus to my computer.
On page seven is the first listing for learning about John Muir the naturalist while driving a Volkswagen (there are a number of sites such as this since many VW lovers are also nature lovers. “Retracing John Muir’s footsteps” is the title of this site).

c. According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir_(Volkswagen) the author of my item is a descendent of John Muir the naturalist. However, there is no further evidence of this assertion and the wiki article cites no source.

d. Searches for “How do I fix my Volkswagen?” and “Do-it-yourself Volkswagen” did not return any mention of my item on any result in the first three pages of either search. Most of these results were for discussion forums.

e. Under search “Volkswagen Repair Manual” the seventh item returned was my item from Amazon.com. These results were useful for finding Volkswagen repair manuals of all sorts.

f. Search for “Volkswagen Repair Manual Special Editions” returned a “30th Anniversary Edition” of my item on the first page of results.

g. A search for “Volkswagen counter culture manuals” returned hits for my item (thought not for any specific edition of my item) or the author of my item throughout the first page beginning with result number 2. Five of the ten results on the first page where for my item or my item’s author.

h. A search for “John Muir not naturalist” brought back the following website in position number two: http://www.sierraclub.org/JOHN_MUIR_EXHIBIT/frameindex.html?http://www.sierraclub.org/JOHN_MUIR_EXHIBIT/people/otherjohn.html
The title of this page is “Other John Muirs” and the third one on my list was the author of my item.

II.
I decided to look at JSTOR with the express purpose of trying to find mention of a connection between the author of my item and John Muir the naturalist. I quickly realized that in JSTOR there is no “subject” search possible. Default search is “full text” and there are also options for “author” “item title” “abstract” and “caption”. All results here are with the default “full text” search, which I know from experience sometimes provides incomplete results.
a. search for “John Muir” returned first page results (25 total) for John Muir the naturalist.
b. search for “John Muir” AND “Volkswagen” returned 71 results. I didn’t look through them all but only the very first result on the first page had direct relevance to my item, an article called “Independent Publishing: Today and Yesterday” (Muir published his book himself).
c. search for “John Muir” NOT “nature” NOT “environment returned 23 of 25 results on the first page explicitly for John Muir the naturalist. Nothing for my item.
d. under “Volkswagen” AND “repair manuals” 21 results were returned, none explicitly
for my item but five item titles were concerned with the history of technology or pollution/transportation issues (which to me means that they might mention my item).
e. under “Volkswagen” AND “counter culture” AND “repair manuals” 13 results were returned none of which mention my item in their reference pages although one treats the issue of technology and culture (“The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other” by Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker).

C.
Woldcat search:
1. Under subject search “John Muir” the first page did not return my item. Five items were explicitly related to John Muir the naturalist and five were obliquely or not at all related to the naturalist.
2. Under subject search “John Muir” AND “Volkswagen” the first ten results are editions of my item.
3. On the first page of results for subject searches “John Muir” NOT “environmentalist” (or “naturalist”) four results explicitly reference John Muir the naturalist (one is even authored by him). No mention of my item in the first 5 pages of results (but plenty of mention of John Muir the naturalist).
4. On the first page of results for subject search “Volkswagen Repair Manual” 7 of the 10 results were for Chilton repair manuals and only 1 (number 8) was my item.
5. Under search “Volkswagen” AND “manuals” AND “counter culture” 1 item is returned title “Classic Commercials of the 50s and 60s: volume 47”.


D.
Under LC subject heading “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc” 6 of the first 10 items were my item. Three were for Chilton’s manual and one was for an unfamiliar repair manual specifically for VW Golfs, Jettas and Cabriolets. The 10th listing was my specific edition (16th) although there is no mention of it as a “special edition” or “anniversary edition” anywhere in the listing.

E.
All of the first page results except for the VW Golf, Jetta and Cabriolet manual descriptors have only one descriptor: “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”. The manual for Golfs, Jettas and Cabriolets include three further descriptors: “Volkswagen Cabriolet automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”, “Golf automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”, “Jetta automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”.

However, following the link to author: “Muir, John 1918-” (still no correction for his death), 44 results return including a book on VW rabbits called How to keep your Volkswagen alive: or, Poor Richard's Rabbit book : being a manual of step-by-step procedures for the compleat idiot : Rabbit, U.S. Golf & Scirocco, the complexities thereof/ which is “Based on How to keep your Volkswagen alive, 1st ed., by John Muir (from the “notes” on the records page).” This item does not list as a descriptor “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc” but only “Rabbit automobile”.

The descriptor results for my item limit my information about the item. Only having one descriptor is like having a dead end. It is interesting that 60% of the items returned under this descriptor are for my item—it is somehow a unique item. Also, that there is a work whose title incorporates the words “Poor Richard’s Rabbit Book” into the original title for my item gives a clue as to the type of manual my item is: a do-it-yourself manual for non-professionals with limited funds.

Part III
A.
For reasons that will be apparent please see below. In brief, Google was far more helpful to me in locating this particular item and information about it and its author than was either Worldcat FirstSearch, Worldcat.org (which was better than Worldcat FirstSearch) or JSTOR (which was unhelpful in trying to find out particularly if my author was related to John Muir the naturalist as Wikipedia claimed he was).


B.
Introduction
In discussing the subject categories of my item and the relevant authority control issues associated with these categories I want to focus on three issues which this item raises for the cataloger and the searcher. First, how to distinguish between authors with the same name, particularly when one author of the same name is relatively obscure and the other author is very well known (even internationally recognized, as in my case). Included in this issue is the issue of how a user can ascertain whether or not two authors of the same name are related (as in my case, a very interesting question considering the older John Muir is a well known naturalist/individualist philosopher and the younger John Muir is a ‘hippy’ philosopher preaching a do-it-yourself mentality).
The second issue to be addressed is how a user can find information or a location for a special edition item. My item is a 25th Anniversary Edition with photos and an introduction by the author’s wife. There us no mention in Worldcat of this work as significant or unique from other editions.
The third issue is how to locate this item as a work of cultural significance. This issue is evident from the disparate results returned between Google and Worldcat/JSTOR when the item was searched for using the identifiers “Volkswagen manual counter culture” or derivatives thereof. Neither Worldcat FirstSearch nor JSTOR returned results which led to my item, whereas Google returned 1 out of every 2 results with references to my item or its author.
Issue 1
In my searches of Worldcat and JSTOR I was unable to effectively isolate John Muir, the author of my work, from John Muir the famous naturalist without adding the term “Volkswagen” to the search. My attempts at excluding John Muir the naturalist (or other appropriate descriptors) from my results list by using the Boolean designator “NOT” (as in “John Muir” NOT “Naturalist”) not only did not result in any returns of my item but also did not result in excluding John Muir the naturalist, who remained the predominant subject of the returned results.
One way to overcome this complaint that has been proposed in the scientific community is to assign individual authors an ID (AID) code. This system was proposed
by Farrokh Habidzadeh and Mahboobeh Yadollahie (2009) in their paper “The Problem of Who.” Not only would such a system aid in the assessment of any particular author’s contribution to science (particularly in the international community where there are multiple spellings for one name and multiple individuals with the same name), but the author’s also argue that “in this way, the key for search of digital databases would be the researcher's AID rather than name (p. 61).” Such a system—though practical in theory—is impractical in implementation on the popular level because it would require one coordinated system of ID’s for every author that has been, is, or will be searchable, and an awareness of such ID’s on the part of the public.
Issue 2
In cataloging systems with controlled vocabulary (authority control) there is no known method of recovering the specific edition (“16th Edition” or “25th Anniversary Edition”) of my item if one does not know the exact edition or that such an Anniversary Edition exists, unless the cataloger has entered this parameters in the descriptive fields (which the LCSH catalogers have not included as part of these headings). At issue here is what is called exhaustivity (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, pp. 310-313). The catalogers for my item decided that specifying the particulars of each edition or of special editions was unnecessary for this item.
Issue 3

Conceptual Connections and Information Poverty
There is a large disparity between information results in popular information environments (such as the internet) and professional information environments (professional KOS’s such as Worldcat FirstSearch of the Library of Congress). This disparity does not appear to be growing less severe, but more severe. It is not only that the popular information environment is growing at an exponential rate while the professional information environment is hindered by formalities and personnel issues. There is an essential difference in the type and quality of information returned in both environments. Understanding and exploiting these differences is becoming one of the most important keys to proficient information access services, however, as of the date of this paper there is little formal discussion focused on conceptualizing or enunciating these differences—specifically in the realm of subject description and authority control—even if there is a great deal of discussion on ways to exploit these differences. What this situation leaves us with is a deficit of approaches in conceptualizing these disparities.
The professional information environment is facing an information revolution. The internet is “democratizing” information in a way in which the traditional information profession was unable (though willing and trying) to do. However, the information revolution is not a “revolution” against the traditional information environment as such. The public is not “revolting” against an “elite” regime of tyrannical librarians who hold the keys to information access. Rather the public is fundamentally renegotiating its attitude towards information, and this renegotiation involves not only the way in which information is organized and retrieved but also the very physical space of traditional information access. In “The Library is Dead, Long Live the Library! The Practice of Academic Librarianship and the Digital Revolution”, for example, authors Lyman Ross and Pongracz Sennyeyb argue that among the many other challenges presented to the academic libraries of university campuses which “still operate under the assumption that their physical location is critical,” the reality is that “their placement on campus is progressively less important” in the age of digital technology (p. 146).” The authors also note that patron use of the physical library has drastically changed: “they (patrons) are buying coffee in our cafes, reading e-mail on our terminals, socializing with friends, or using group studies.” They are “are not using library resources or services (p. 146).”
With so much on their plates as a result of the digital/information revolution, it is no wonder that librarians and information professionals have not had the time to address some of the most demanding concerns regarding information organization and retrieval. Nevertheless these concerns are blatant and, for many users, intuitively obvious—demonstrated by the types of cultural shifts which Ross and Sennybab describe. The large disparities in information results which are received on searches in Google and Worldcat FirstSearch demonstrate that there is a type of information poverty being made apparent on the part of the professional information environment which is not a characteristic of the public domain, and yet there have been few attempts to treat some of the most underlying causes of this poverty at the point of authority control, let alone at defining the symptoms.
How do we measure information wealth? It is fine to argue that Worldcat has made libraries wealthier through its efforts and successes at international cataloging coordination. That is true. But libraries are still paupers compared to the internet when it comes to finding and realizing advanced forms of information connections particularly in the cultural domain. When it comes to authority control, it is the connections between subject headings and other descriptive fields which are poverty ridden in traditional KOS’s , relative, that is, to internet search engines.
My item is a case in point. A simple Google search for “Volkswagen manuals counter culture” returned 5 out of 10 results for my item. A .500 batting average in baseball is unheard of; in the world of information literacy I would think it indicates dead-on accuracy. According to Google, therefore, the description that I used for my book is shared by the general public. Yet Worldcat and JSTOR do not even register my item when I search them with the same descriptors. How is Google able to achieve conceptual, cultural, and informational connections which professional information sources are unable to facilitate, and what are the implications for this phenomena on our information organization tactics as a society?

Authority Control
The issue here is exactly the issue of authority control, or more precisely, what is called “the authority record”. Taylor and Joudrey (2009) define an authority record as “a compilation of metadata about a person, a family, a corporate body, a place, a work, or a subject. It includes evidence of all the decisions made and all the relationships among variants that have been identified (p. 252).” The difference between results which are generated by search engines such as Google and those which are retrieved using databases such as Worldcat Firstsearch is that Worldcat uses authority records which are independent from and exist outside of the parameters and particularly the results of any given search. This record is called an authority file (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, p. 254).
For search engines such as Google, however, the search results effectively are the authority file. There is no alternative authority exterior to the search results themselves, and each search generates a relatively unique set of results. In “Google and Beyond: Information Retrieval on the World Wide Web,” Richard Northedge (2007) describes the process by which Google arrives at search results. Because each search engine company’s particular method of arriving at search results are proprietary and secret, we can only know how Google arrives at its results through deduction, even with the assistance of Google’s results explanation pages. The way most search engines function, Northedge explains,
is to break down the page into its individual elements, usually down to word level, and to examine and cross-reference each of those elements. Significance is usually attached to the position of the element, with words in titles and subheadings often given more weight than those in ordinary body text (p. 194).
Google, however, utilizes an extra capacity for creating a page ranking hierarchy which is achieved through an algorithmic formula. This algorithm— known as “PageRank”—
relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’ (p. 194).
Google’s results, in other words, are a direct result of calculations based upon a user-created authority structure: the more popular the page is, the higher it is placed on the results list for any given search parameters. The authority of Google search results derive from the users, not from an exterior authority source created by an isolated group of individuals.
There are countless criticisms of the search engine system. Hunter R. Rawlings III (2007), who served as president of Cornell University during the years which saw the rise of Google, pointed to a number of the most bothersome faults in search engine technology (and of the internet as information source in general) in an address at the 151st ARL Membership Meeting in Washington DC on October 10, 2007. Pointing out that the system by which search engines operate attempts to strike a balance between “popularity and relevance”, Rawlings described the type of information retrieval that one can often experience using Google: “The result is that those pursuing knowledge on the Web tend to follow a "vein" of information leading along a narrow track, a track created by ‘measures of authority.’” And yet, ironically, those are the same words that could be applied to the Worldcat descriptor headings of my item, which was, namely, one: “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”. This ‘vein’ of information led me to a dead end (since the descriptor link led me back almost exclusively to the item). Google, on the other hand, produced results which indicated that, via the balance of “popularity and relevance”, the top 5 out of 10 websites agree that How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot is more than just a “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc” item. It is also a culturally distinct and significant artifact of the 1960’s generation. And that is not even to say that the other 5 results disagree.

Revolutionary Authority Control: A Lack of Literature
Hunter Rawlings’ analysis of internet information gathering leading us down a narrow track might be a relevant analysis for some items, but not for mine. In fact, I experienced just the opposite: traditional sources were narrow in their description and revolutionary sources were just that: revolutionary. One of the problems in approaching these disparities is that information professionals and scholars currently have no definitive manner of addressing them. A search on the “Library Literature and Information Full Text” database, for example, for such terms as “authority control, information, revolution” (or various manifestations of these terms); “Google, Worldcat”; “authority control, democratization, information”; and a number of other parameters meant to get at the heart of this issue resulted in next to nothing. A search for “democratization, information” on LibLit yielded the most promising results, but then only 33, none of which mention authority control. Am I using the wrong search parameters? Am I the only one who has faced the issue of the disparities between popular and professional cataloging results? Perhaps we are waiting for the dam to break.
What is at stake in the conflict between popular and professional information organization is exactly the issue of “authority”, as in “authority control”. Taylor and Joudrey (2009) point out that “the concepts of authority and control in a culture with an emphasis on individualism are not readily welcome (pp. 249-250),” but despite the arguments for the need for authority control professional librarians are being forced to take stock in the fact that “popular relevance” information sources such as Google offer up-to-date reflections of info org trends which are just not possible under the current authority control practices of information institutions such as the Library of Congress.
When we discuss “authority control” we inevitably come up against the notion of “controlled vocabulary”, and it is exactly these two notions which are being challenged by the information revolution. In a recent article called “Term selection: the key to successful indexing”, Zhang Qiyu (2009) reviews the golden rules of term selection for indexers creating catalog entries:
Choose your terms well, with respect for what's in the document and for the needs of the user. Identify the relevant, exclude the superfluous, spot the unsaid, make the connections, order it all in such a way as to catch the users attention and you will have achieved your goal: the creation of an index that will take users easily and directly to the information they are seeking from whatever the point at which they begin the search (p. 100).
The process Qiyu describes is a process which is more akin to art than science. Indeed, at the beginning of the article Qiyu refers to the “document or document collection” as the “indexer’s canvas” (p. 98). Nor is Qiyu unique in using an artistic analogy. Enid Zafran (2009) compares indexing to “power walking” in “Power Wording or How to Get Umph into Your Keywords”, and even an article such as Fred Leise’s (2008) “Controlled Vocabularies, an Introduction”, which treats controlled vocabularies as a science of “taxonomy”, cannot resist the urge to include poetic sentences such as: “Once a controlled vocabulary has been created, it cannot just be shelved and forgotten. It becomes a living thing which must be tended and cared for (p. 126).”
Traditionally, controlled vocabularies and authority control have been viewed as a service to the user, creating what Joe Matthews (2000) calls “consistent vocabulary, thus reducing extraneous or false retrievals or ‘noise’ (online resource).” In an era of “information scarcity” (as Michael Jensen refers to the decades—even centuries—before the digital revolution) such vocabularies served a specific and useful purpose. However, in an age of “information abundance” (Jensen 2008, p. 298) users question the validity of information authority which cannot deliver up-to-date and self-aware descriptors or classifications of items. The problem is made all the more acute when it is realized that what was at one time considered to be a science is really no more than a complex form of subjective decision making whose core functions resemble artistic creativity rather than scientific precision. In an environment where Google search results provide more open-ended and creative avenues of discovery, the “authority” of authority control is becoming more and more unwieldy and dismiss-able.


Conclusion
Until professional information catalogers find a method of conceptualizing and treating the information disparities which are evident between traditional and revolutionary KOS’s, amateur and even professional information seekers will continue to use general search engines as their go-to source for information selection. Libraries and traditional cataloging schemes will be used to find physical objects, but not to find the kind of nuanced, unique, and heuretic connections that many users find to be the most enriching aspects of research. When we approach the issue of “authority 2.0” (to adapt Jensen’s terminology) from the perspective of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot, there are a number of causes for concern for the future validity of authority control. Information organization which is vested in the hands of a small group of elite artist-types who have neither the broad specialization nor the capacity to deliver conceptions of cultural artifacts which reflect users’ needs in an up-to-date fashion is hardly “authority”, and it is to the credit of the librarian community that so much of the literature is focused on implementing new technology into the information landscape rather than preserving older and more traditional information organization paradigms. In this way libraries have been able to avoid the association of “authority” with “tyranny” when it comes to information retrieval, but they have not yet completely dodged the mounting suspicion of irrelevance.

Addendum
In a very useful article entitled “‘Have You Searched Google Yet?’ Using Google as a Discovery Tool for Cataloging,” Jennifer Lang (2007) argues that Google and other search engines are an excellent way for librarians to find information about an item which is incompletely presented to the cataloger (due to damage such as no book cover, partial presentation such as receiving a DVD or CD with no cover, etc. Lang also cites Google’s archive of cached websites and Google’s translation tool as useful for catalogers). Lang conducted an informal survey of professional librarians and found that of those responding to the survey “under the age of 40, almost 95% reported using Google in their cataloging, while a little over 85% of the catalogers over 40 reported the same (p. 8).” “Many respondents consider Google important for authority work,” Lang concludes, “and others reported using Google for the same reasons I do, including its translation and caching functions (p. 8).”
Lang’s experience is that Google helps her to supplement her information about any given item and thus helps her to properly catalog that item. My argument is that Google helps us to conceptualize an item in revolutionary and popular ways. Google aids the cataloger in achieving a greater degree of what Taylor and Joudrey refer to as “depth indexing (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, p. 310).” While Lang’s article and my comments to it are still “practical application” discussions, they at least take us closer toward discovering a meaningful way to discuss one of the most significant challenges to the librarian profession that has presented itself during these early years of the digital/information revolution.



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